Office lease negotiations are complex, and tenants who lack strong representation are often at a serious disadvantage—they don’t know what they don’t know. One key area where this shows up is the tenant improvement allowance (TIA).
TenantSee Weekly: AirOffice
For many companies, office space is among a variety of resources they make available to employees to help facilitate work. Other primary resources include technology. In fact, today, technology arguably contributes more to how work is done than the physical office. The diminished role of the office in facilitating work has resulted in changes in how companies look to use office space. One manifestation of this change is in flexible offices, or coworking spaces. This product segment, having grown considerably over the past decade, is tangible proof of shifting consumer sentiment.
TenantSee Weekly: How Investor Exit Options Affect the San Francisco Office Market
TenantSee Weekly: Do Cities Still Matter?
I grew up in a small town but I always dreamed about big cities. I sensed they were special places where, given the right amount of drive, the right mindset, one simply could not fail. Sure, there would be ups and downs, but cities provided access to a robust network of opportunity. This was in stark contrast to the small New England towns of my childhood, many of which never fully recovered from the demise of the textile mills in the early 1900s.
TenantSee Weekly: Planning for the Future, not the Moment
Urban planning can go horribly wrong. It often fails the test of time. 1950s America brought a surge in suburban development and car transportation. It also led to one of the single worst American urban design decisions (my opinion), the development of the Embarcadero Freeway, originally intended to connect the San Francisco Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge by extending along the northeastern edge of the city as it hugs the bay -- effectively blocking the views along one of the most scenic corridors in any US city.
TenantSee Weekly: Less Space, More Uncertainty
Over the past year our small team based in San Francisco has not worked on a single assignment in which the client is expanding its leased office space. In some cases, the leased footprint remains the same, but many clients are decreasing their leased space. We're doing work all over North America. Client approaches to the office range from the following:
TenantSee Weekly: We're In A Pandemic, Why Is My Rent Increasing?
This is a common question for tenants looking to negotiate lease extensions in the current market environment. Intuitively, they expect their occupancy cost to decrease due to the effects of the pandemic (e.g., higher vacancy, less demand, etc.). However, they often fail to realize the point of impact, or the base values on which market softness has its affect, are values that were in place just prior to the pandemic, not values from 5+ years ago when they signed the original lease…